If you are wondering how to become a web developer, or have just started down the road, chances are that you will have come across several factors that you feel may block your entry into the industry.

You may think you don't have the correct equipment, contacts or know-how to become a web development professional. Have you heard people say things like "you need a Mac to develop website properly" or "you must be passionate about design"?

Well, you won't find any of that here. I've been there and come out of the other side with a career in web development.

Clichés are ripe within the web development industry, and they do more harm than good. In an industry where many people contribute their development time for free to open-source projects, it's much better to try to include a wide variety of people, rather than a select few who, to some, may have the cream of the crop equipment or the contacts that money can't buy.

So here is a run down of the things that are not essential to becoming a web developer, viable alternatives to them, and advice to try to get you closer to your goals.

1. Any Apple products

The ubiquitous Apple Mac haunts the portfolio of almost every digital agency. If they're not right there plastered with the agency's work, they're being waved about by the staff or just sneaking in at the edge of an office shot.

No doubt, Mac's are easy to use and aesthetically pleasing, and do lend an air of creativity to a business, but they are expensive, and are certainly not essential to building a website. The computer you are reading this article on is almost certainly powerful enough to build a web site.

2. Any Adobe products

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard design package for designing websites, and along with Illustrator and Dreamweaver, Adobe's Creative Suite is a very full featured design package. But again, it's expensive, and no web development job means no web development money.

There are some great, free graphic design packages, that, while they might not pack in as many features as other paid for packages, are well up to the job of creating media for the web. GNOME distribute free software, including image manipulation software GIMP and the vector drawing tool Inkscape, and are well worth checking out.

3. An encyclopedic knowledge of everything web

I strongly believe that part of my job is to keep up with current web technologies and standards. Things change so fast that if keeping up isn't one of your priorities, then quite soon you will be less able to deliver the best project work you can.

The flip-side of this is that if you are interested in becoming a web programmer, you will not have to know every technology, every trick and every application - most web developers still don't. Being positive, adaptable and willing to learn will more than make up for gaps in knowledge.

4. An obsession with web standards

This is a contentious one. Without web standards the web would be much worse off than it is today, and future advancement would be hampered without a clear road-map. Web standards are here to stay and will continue to help developers deliver cross-browser web applications.

However, if you have validated your mark-up to W3C standards and find that you have some errors that you can't overcome, don't worry. At the time of writing this article, I checked tumblr.com and amazon.com by the direct input method of the W3C validator and both came back with errors (Amazon had 470!), and people still blog on Tumblr and buy stuff from Amazon.

As an admission, the mark-up of my homepage comes back with one error, due to the tracking code of Google Analytics. If the choice is between obsessing over standards and knowing what's going down on my website, I'll take the latter.

5. A "passion" for design

As a web developer you will no doubt have to do some design at some point, from creating a whole web design to adding a new page following a template, but selling yourself as something you are not is a bad idea, and has the potential to ruin any interview.

Do you really think about design twenty-four hours a day? Or do you have much more specific skills that would be of interest to an employer?

6. Any friends within the industry

When I got my first job as a developer, I didn't know anyone in the industry. I didn't even really know of anyone. I read a few blogs, but I certainly didn't have any contacts.

This is a bad position to be in, but just goes to show that a concerted effort in creating a CV and going through the usual channels of job sites and recruitment consultants pays off (thanks Fiona at Perfect Marketing People!).

7. To be social media genius

I probably had about thirty followers on Twitter at the time of my employment and certainly wasn't going to get a job off any of my mates on Facebook. A social media presence shows that you are digitally inclined and is fully recommended (and come on, it is free), but being a "social media maven" or whatever they call themselves these days certainly isn't necessary.

8. To be top of Google

Again, I don't think my website was anywhere for any good search terms on Google (which has changed recently), but I came number one for my name. Just being findable online is a massive help to any bid getting into a digital career.

9. Expensive hosting

If you are going to take the plunge and create your own, hosted website with your own domain (and I advise you do), you don't need a dedicated server to do it on. You get what you pay for in web hosting, but there are very cheap options for starting out, making it so cheap that you'd be mad not to make your own site.

If you do want a free option, create a blog on Tumblr or Wordpress.com and focus on creating great content.

10. A degree (in computer science)

Degrees are great. They are instant proof that you can be committed to a project and can apply yourself, and will more than likely help you get an interview. But they are not essential for a job as a web dev. I have a degree that is almost completely unrelated to web development (Physics and Philosophy - I did a bit off C++), but this didn't stop me entering the profession. The thing that got me my first job was experience.

The digital creative industries are mostly quite new; there are very few people who can boast 10 years of experience as a web developer (although there certainly are a few). Also, most agencies will want someone who can, at least in part, hit the ground running when they start.

This means that someone with relevant experience, who are relatively rare, will more likely be offered a position than someone without experience - degree or no degree. But how are you supposed to get a job with no experience, and experience with no job?

Bonus! Three Things You Will Need!

1. Experience

As I've already mentioned, making your own site is a great way to gain practice, experience and exposure. A blog is a good place to start, and creating helpful content within a certainniche will help with career focus and SEO within your site.

There are somanyfreeresources online that you should start to teach yourself development as soon as possible. It may seem like a daunting task, but you will be able to put what you have learnt into practice very quickly.

What ever you do, make sure you have an about page with some information about your skills, interests in your spare time and that you are looking for employment, and an easy to find email address so people can get in touch.

2. Experience

If you've created yourself a website, why not create one for someone else? There are plenty of charities that will appreciate someone creating them a website. Chances are you will have to take charity gigs for free, but at your stage of career, experience is worth more than money - you can't buy your way into a job.

You should also ask around your friends and family, and their friends and colleagues. Spread the word that you are prepared to help create a website for someone at a reasonable rate, or just help someone maintain a current website. Getting those URLs on your CV is vital.

3. Experience

Noticing a theme here?

If you've created you own site and got some more experience through charities or friends, why not get involved in an open source project? GitHub is a great network full of people who code collaboratively. If you see a project that is of interest to you, why not fork it and add some extra functionality? Or, you could download a project and create a working demo, with blog posts explaining the finer details as you go.

Whatever you do, make sure you get some experience on your CV. You may hit the jackpot and walk straight into a job from college or university, but if you are struggling, or keep getting passed over for people with more experience, it's time to knuckle down and get some serious coding done!

Oh, and attention to detail is critical. All your hard work may be in vain if you miss a detail as basic as getting a link wrong, so check those URLs on your CV.

At launch, my homepage joined the ranks of those trying to rid the net of a deprecated convention, and decided against the www.

Why is the www. deprecated? Well, it just isn't necessary, as the people at No-WWW. explain, "Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required".

So if the www. is deprecated, what are the benefits of not using it? Well, none. The most important thing is that you CHOOSE TO USE IT OR NOT and then stick to it. The problem arises with search engine optimisation, as Canonical SEO explains. A search engine may well list your homepage twice, once with the www. and once without. This is bad for your page rank, because the more inbound links to your site, the higher your rank. With your links potentially being split between two pages, your site will appear lower in search listings.

This problem can easily be remedied, all by adding three lines to your .htaccess file that will direct all the traffic from the www. site to the non-www. site or visa-versa. The .htaccess file is an Apache configuration file located in the root directory of your website. You can edit it through your FTP program. It may be hidden, much like a hidden file on a PC, so go to your FTP program's settings and find and click the box that says "Show hidden files and folders" or similar.

Whether you choose www. or not is up to you. But, answer me this. When was the last time you said the www. whilst discussing a website? Or saw it on an ad? Or typed it into your browser? Without it, devilishly clever URLs have been created, such as http://del.icio.us and http://tr.im. And don't forget, www is the most inefficient abbreviation ever. It has three times the syllables (nine) than the phrase it is an acronym of (three).

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an organisation dedicated to developing standard practices and guidelines to help the internet grow in a positive way.

The W3C produce recommendations about how to best apply a web programming language. Everything from current standards, such as XHTML, the mark-up language this website is coded in, to newer languages, such as Service Modeling Language, a language used to model complex services and systems, are explained in detail. These guidelines are only recommended after the endorsement of W3C members and its Director.

By complying with the W3C recommendations set out for web programming, a web designer can produce sites that are easily accessible to a user and compatible with the range of browsers that are available today. Why should the browser you're using effect how the web looks? Well, in a perfect world, it shouldn't, but different browsers support different programming languages to different degrees.

To aid web programmers in complying with the recommendations for HTML, the W3C provide a validator to check a designer's code against its own guidelines. This service shows errors and warnings if your code does not match the specific guidelines set out for HTML (or XHTML). Validators for CSS, hyperlinks and mobile devices, among others, are also provided.

Membership to the W3C is open to companies and individuals, of which there are over 400. The advantages of membership for a company is to get an early insight into market trends and emerging technologies, not to mention the kudos received for being an innovator within the industry and the networking possibilities.

To give you an idea of the sort of early insight we are talking about, the W3C launched the Mobile Web Initiative, to facilitate mobile web access, in May 2005, over a year and a half before the release of the iPhone. In February 1998, XML, the language used for RSS news feeds and blogs, became a W3C recommendation, five years before Google bought Blogspot.com.

Currently, the W3C is focusing on the tools to bring about a Semantic world wide web. This is a vision of the internet where data is easily accessible to a wide range of applications, rather than the model we have now, where applications control data.

Since its creation in October 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet, the W3C has been at the forefront of the development of the web, and now, with the creation of the Web Science Research Initiative, the goal for the future is to "build synergies between Web Science and Web Standards - to ensure that the Web benefits all people on the planet". If you are anybody from a web enthusiast to an associate in a large corporation, news from the W3C and its associated bodies is always worth following.